The British woman was sailing from Kochi, India, to Phuket, Thailand, with her husband, Marc Horn, when she saw what appeared to be a large aircraft on fire.

“I thought I saw a burning plane cross behind our stern from port to starboard, which would have been approximately north to south,” Ms Tee wrote on sailing website, Cruisers’ Forum.

“Since that’s not something you see every day, I questioned my mind. I was looking at what appeared to be an elongate plane glowing bright orange, with a trail of black smoke behind it. It did occur to me that it might be a meteorite. But I thought it was more likely that I was going insane.”

The plane that just disappeared ... students from an international school in Zhuji, China, pray for the passengers on-board Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.Source: Getty Images

On Tuesday she told Thailand’s Phuket Gazette newspaper that she was on night-watch on the couple’s 40 foot sloop on the night of March 7-8.

“I saw something that looked like a plane on fire. That’s what I thought it was. Then I thought I must be mad. It caught my attention because I had never seen a plane with orange lights before so I wondered what they were,” she said.

“I could see the outline of the plane, it looked longer than planes usually do. There was what appeared to be black smoke behind it.

“There were two other planes well above it — moving the other way — at the time. They had normal navigation lights. I remember thinking that if it was a plane on fire that I was seeing, the other aircraft would report it.”

The couple arrived in Phuket two days later, on March 10, but Ms Tee didn’t report her sighting to the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) until Sunday.

The 41-year-old, who spent 13 months at sea, said she did not report the incident at the time because she was having marital issues and thought she might be going mad.

“So when we hit land everyone was talking about the missing plane and asking if we’d seen anything. Since I doubted what I saw and was emotionally in a bad way, I brushed over what I thought I’d seen … Besides, I thought they’d find it,” she said.

But media reports at the weekend about the embattled search for the missing plane prompted the couple to recheck their sailing logs.

“But tonight I heard that they were looking in the wrong place, so HWMO (her husband) and I looked back through our GPS logs and lo and behold, what we saw was consistent with the confirmed contact which the authorities had from MH370,” she said.

Mr Horn, 50, then posted maps of their yacht’s route on sailing website, Cruisers’ Forum, where they discovered that their yacht was in the vicinity of one of MH370’s projected flight paths on the night it disappeared.

Ms Tee now believes they were near one of the projected flight paths for the aircraft.

She said a map revealed that the aircraft would have passed the yacht astern.

“This is what convinced me to file a report with the full track data for our voyage to the relevant authorities,” she said.

Found no evidence of disappeared plane ... Phoenix Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Bluefin-21 is craned over the side of Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield.Source: Getty Images

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